Web UI tool comparison

Introduction

There are many opportunities surrounding Fedora to create user interface experiences. Many times it is preferred that these interfaces be deployed in such a was as they can be accessed via a web browser. One specific example of this is seen in the plan to replace the Fedora Administrative GUI with a web-based solution. This comparison considers the capabilities and benefits of several tools for building rich internet applications. The goal of this comparison is to aid developers in determining the appropriate tool(s) to use when building UIs for Fedora.

Disclaimer

These write ups are generally completed after conducting research about the tool and experimenting with using it for a day or two. If you have implementation experience with a particular tool feel free to add notes or comments.

Adobe Flex

What is it?

Flex is a framework for building rich internet applications which are run using Adobe's Flash player in the browser, and Adobe's AIR on the desktop

How long did it take to create a test application and get things working? How much code was required?

Created a test application which allows a user to view an object's Dublin Core metadata, FOXML, and datastream list after entering an object's PID. The user can then click on any of the datastreams that are image files and view the image. This application required about a day to create (including technology ramp time) and the completed code (an XML file) is 77 lines, including comments and whitespace.

How rich does the API/toolkit appear to be, are there obvious limitations?

Rich selection of UI components and widgets. REST requests can be made very easily in a single line. SOAP requests are also fairly simple to accomplish. The BlazeDS data service can be set up to allow calls directly to POJOs on the server. The Flex Builder tool integrates with Eclipse and makes development and deployment convenient.

How much documentation/support is available?

Documentation seems very good. Answers to development questions are available through examples and API reference information. Complete reference API similar to javadoc is available. Significant documentation is available from Adobe, and there are several recently published books available on Amazon for developing with Flex.

What language is used for development? How difficult is it to learn and use?

A flavor of XML called MXML is used to lay out and define components while ActionScript is used to handle events and perform more complex behaviors. Didn't have to use ActionScript at all to create the test application, but it appears similar syntax-wise to JavaScript. Learning the tags, attributes, and possible values for MXML takes time but is straight-forward in most cases.

To what extent can the code/work be reused in other interfaces?

What are your impressions of the technology in general?

What is the deployment scheme?

Which portions are open source?

What are the client requirements?

What is the market penetration?

Open Laszlo

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

AJAX libaries (Dojo, Rico, etc) with HTML, CSS